Whit Mason – In the past few weeks, two Australian dreams have come crashing to earth. First, there was chaos in East Timor and then the Socceroos' defeat by Italy. Notwithstanding some dubious officiating in the latter, both disappointments stemmed from much the same shortcoming.
As Guus Hiddink said after the Socceroos lost to Italy, dominating the game in midfield is all very well, but in itself it doesn't achieve the goal of the game; to win, eventually you have to put the ball in the net. Incremental successes, in other words, don't necessarily add up to ultimate victory.
In East Timor, successfully managing the nuts and bolts of constructing a tiny new state could not in itself achieve the goal of the intervention: to help midwife the birth of a new East Timorese society free of the violence, insecurity and indignities its people suffered under Indonesian rule.
The Australian-led peacekeeping force and the UN administration in East Timor earned their reputation for success by doing well the things that other missions have often also done well. We know how to address the material needs of displaced people. We know how to deploy security forces to keep a lid on some forms of violence, at least temporarily. We know how to organise elections. And we know how to draw up new political institutions that conform, on paper, to our notions about prosperous, democratic societies.
What today's nation-builders do much less effectively – if indeed they attempt it at all – is to heal the wounds or fill the gaps in a society's political culture which either caused, or resulted from, their violent collapse.
Societies don't fall apart because they lack the manual skills to build simple shelters or even to describe idealised political institutions. They fall apart because their people, often aggravated by trauma, material privations or institutional shortcomings, lack the capacity to resolve their differences civilly. This lack, in turn, reflects the absence of a sense of belonging to a community that extends beyond the family or village, and the confidence that one's countrymen will operate according to an identity of interests and a set of shared mores.
While realising that even collapsed societies can have very good elements, nation-builders must recognise that their political cultures invariably require first intensive surgery and then lengthy rehabilitation.
Much of the failure to address the essence of the nation and state building challenge – in Kosovo and Afghanistan at least as much as in East Timor – can be traced to ignorance about the host society (and non-Western and traumatised societies in general), to ideologically imposed constraints (often reinforced by timidity and stinginess), and to self-defeating hastiness.
East Timor's recent crisis was sparked by frustrations among soldiers and police from its western provinces. Mike Smith, a retired Australian major-general who was deputy commander of the UN peacekeeping force in East Timor, said last week that the peacekeepers were never aware of any ethnic or regional divisions within the army.
In a fractured society, nation-builders must assume that people's loyalties are primarily local. They should also assume that being victimised has not generally ennobled people but made them anxious and mistrustful.
Most of those involved in the East Timor intervention were laudably loath to act like neo-imperialists. But such unobtrusiveness can be self-defeating. The Falantil freedom fighters, for example, were allowed to create an army – without mechanisms to prevent its domination by a regional power base.
East Timor is the poorest nation in Asia and has one of its highest birth rates. Yet foreign nation-builders deferred to the Catholic church's view of family planning, even while struggling to build an economy to provide for the exploding population.
Nation-building is a long process – much longer than the political and budgetary cycles that drive the politicians and bureaucrats who decide when interventions begin and end. Officials on the ground in East Timor pleaded with the UN Security Council to maintain a robust presence well after the country's independence in 2002 to no avail. Alas, time was up before the goal was found.
[Whit Mason is the co-author of Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo, Hurst, London, published last week. He is a former UN official and NGO director in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and East Asia.]